Skills Development Scotland has operated a data collection system called PROMT for many years. PROMT is a client application (not browser-based) that sits on your computer and presents you with a series of screens for each course you want to maintain. Each course may have many 'opportunities' (these are the same as XCRI-CAP presentations) with different start dates, visibility windows and other characteristics. Many fields in PROMT have specific requirements for content that make the experience of keying not particularly enjoyable (though it has been improved since first launch).

With OU course marketing information consisting of several hundred courses and over 1,000 opportunities, it was with some relief that we at APS (running 3rd party course marketing information dissemination for The OU) turned to the SDS' Bulk Update facility, using XCRI-CAP 1.1. We had been nervous of using this facility initially, because PROMT data is used not only for the SDS' course search service, but also has a direct link to a student registration and tracking service for ILAs (Independent Learning Accounts; for non-Scottish readers, ILAs continued in Scotland even though they were discontinued for a while south of the border). Students can get ILA funding only for specific types of course, so each course/opportunity has to be approved by Skills Development Scotland. Changes to the course marketing information can result in ILA approval being automatically rescinded (albeit temporarily), which can mean the provider losing student tracking details, and therefore being at risk of losing the student entirely. So naturally we decided to do some careful testing in conjunction with both SDS and our colleagues at The OU's Scottish office.

Fortunately we discovered that when we uploaded opportunities the system added them on to existing records, rather than replacing them, so student tracking was unaffected. In addition, individual fields of course records for existing courses was over-written but the records remained active and opportunities were unchanged. These features meant that data integrity was maintained for the opportunity records, and we could always revert to the existing version and delete the new, if necessary.

We were able to load new courses with new opportunities, and also existing courses with new opportunities with no significant problems. The potential ILA difficulty was somewhat reduced, because The OU's information for an individual opportunity does not need to be updated once it has been approved for ILA; our main reason for updating opportunities themselves was to add in fees information, but cost information has to be present before an opportunity can gain ILA approval, so this type of update would not interrupt ILA approval or student tracking.

Owing to requirements for some proprietary data, for example numerical fees information and separate VAT, not everything could be captured through XCRI-CAP. However, using the PROMT interface for checking the data, adding in very small extras and deleting duplicated opportunities was comparatively light work, as the mass of it was handled by the XCRI-CAP import.

Strikingly good parts of our Bulk Update process (apart from the obvious vast reduction in keying time):

• Use of a vocabulary for qualification type in PROMT. This made it easy to use various rules to map from The OU data to the required qualification grouping. These rules included a close examination of the content of the qualification title in the XCRI-CAP data to make sure we mapped to the correct values.
• For some elements, use of standardised boilerplate text in specific circumstances, again identified by business rules.
• Good reporting back from the SDS Bulk Update system on the status (and errors) from the import. This included an online status report showing how many records of each type had been successfully uploaded, with date and time, after a few minutes from the time of loading.
• The system permits us to download the whole data set (well, technically as much as could be mapped) in XCRI-CAP 1.1 format, so we were able to compare the whole new set of records with what we expected to have.
• The ability to review the new data in the PROMT client interface within minutes of the Bulk Upload. This gives a great reassurance that nothing's gone wrong, and it permits rapid checking and small tweaks if necessary.

I see this combination of bulk upload with a client or web-based edit and review interface as an excellent solution to course marketing information collection. This push method of data synchronisation has the advantage of maintaining the provider's control of the supply, and it still permits fine-tuning, checking and manual editing if that is necessary. In contrast a fully automatic 'pull' version might leave the provider out of the loop - not knowing either whether the data has been updated, or whether any mistakes have been made. This is particularly important in cases where the collector is unfamiliar with the provider's data.

XCRI-CAP: turn 12 days of keying into 3 hours of checking.

I've been musing for some while now on the SITS Module and Course Collaboration meeting in November, arranged by colleagues at Cranfield University and the University of Wolverhampton. The latter has implemented a Module Approval system using SITS Process Manager, and their approach had several particularly interesting characteristics:

• An insistence that academics must deliver what's been validated and what students have been told about, rather than permitting on-the-fly variations.
• Academics are asked to write information for the student audience (not for validation processes) - this required some training.
• A primary purpose of writing information was to enable it to be re-used.
• Everyone has access to everything; nothing is filtered out so it can't be seen.
• It isn't a 'fits all needs' solution, but it 'does most'.

I think this highlights some particular issues for different circumstances in different institutional cultures.

'Deliver what's validated and what the students have been told about' might seem like a no-brainer. However, practice varies across institutions and even within institutions, and the process of course design (rather than delivery) can be seen as a continuous one with no particular end point. As a board game designer and board game player, I see a parallel here. Game design is also an ongoing process that never finishes, as improvements to the game can always be made. But when playing an instance of the game, it's essential that the players know the rules are fixed, or the game loses its credibility and the players' experience is undermined. Similarly, even if you *want* to improve the instance of a course, changing aspects of the advertised and expected course arrangements or curriculum can undermine the student experience. Sitting on your hands and waiting till the next iteration might be a better approach, but does the academic culture or common practice support this approach?

'Writing for the student audience' and re-use of information are key aspects of maximising the advantage of process improvement and standardisation using XCRI-CAP, I feel. Implementation of this type of change may be difficult, especially in a heavily decentralised institution, because it entails engagement of the whole academic community and perhaps a change in the culture not only of how to write courses information, but also in the freedom that individuals perceive they ought to have in creating the materials. This is a good example of how an information management process can have a potentially far-reaching impact on culture.

'Everyone has access to everything'. Everyone knows that access to information is a power-based concept. This may be a particularly high hurdle for some institutions, but if visibility is poor, then process inefficiencies and potentially quality-destroying workarounds or breaches of regulations and guidelines, can be concealed. In many revisions of validation and approval processes, there is a tension between the perceived flexibility of 'free form' manual processes (even though they may take a long time) and the perceived inflexibility of digital ones (even though they may be quicker). However, these perceptions often hide the complexity of existing manual methods and cloud the 'business rules' that are supposed to be applied. Cultural change may be necessary, so that staff actually adhere to methods, time scales, and detailed procedures that have been formally promulgated in the past, but not necessarily fully  adhered to in the present. Processes supported by digital technologies should model the agreed business rules, such that flexibility and inflexibility are reflections of the agreed processes. I suspect that this is the core technical challenge of process improvement here.

The final bullet is also important. It's unlikely that the nirvana of a perfect solution will be reached by process improvement and associated cultural change. Expectations have to be managed. Change must be an improvement on existing methods, but each person has to be sufficiently involved in and engaged with the proposed changes that their understanding of the change process itself enables that individual to realise the limitations of the changes. And oft-times the new processes must be able to cope with, or support, valid exceptions and complexity.

From the CETIS blog 'Other Voices', Lou McGill considers how institutions connect and manage course information, and the role that XCRI can play.